THE 1940S RE­LIVED

Dur­ing the 1930s, Brook­lands was Bri­tain’s premier rac­ing cir­cuit, a glam­orous venue re­served for ‘the right crowd and no crowd­ing’. By the fol­low­ing decade, it had switched to air­craft pro­duc­tion, build­ing Vick­ers Welling­tons and War­wicks, and Hawker Hur­ri­canes, among oth­ers.

Both these im­por­tant as­pects of Brook­lands’ life were marked dur­ing The 1940s Re­lived, look­ing back to one of the more sig­nif­i­cant eras of its – and Bri­tain’s – his­tory. Clas­sics from the 1940s and pre-WWII were given pride of place at the mu­seum’s pad­dock, but ma­chines from later years also crept in through­out the day. Those un­sung he­roes of the era, com­mer­cial and ser­vice mod­els, were made es­pe­cially wel­come this year, rang­ing from hum­ble de­liv­ery vans through to fire en­gines and am­bu­lances.

This fifth stag­ing of the event fea­tured the es­tab­lished and very pop­u­lar for­mula of cel­e­brat­ing the mil­i­tary and civvy styles and fash­ions of the pe­riod with re-en­ac­tors and vis­i­tors dress­ing up suit­ably – it seemed even more num­bers than ever en­tered into the spirit of things for 2016. There was a vin­tage mar­ket, mu­sic, danc­ing and a fly­past from, ap­pro­pri­ately enough, a Hawker Hur­ri­cane of the Bat­tle of Bri­tain Memorial Flight.

The large crowds who at­tended made this gath­er­ing a big suc­cess, and prob­a­bly much more en­joy­able than the aus­tere and dan­ger­ous re­al­ity of the time. Richard Gunn